Organize This

(Democrat) Sandra Tsing Lo writes that the Obamas should have been more supportive of their local school system:

it is with huge grief-filled disappointment that I discovered that the Obamas send their children to the University of Chicago Laboratory School (by 5th grade, tuition equals $20,286 a year). The school's Web site quotes all that ridiculous John Dewey nonsense about developing character while, of course, isolating your children from the poor. A pox on them and, while we're at it, a pox on John Dewey! I'm sick to death of those inspirational Dewey quotes littering the Web sites of $20,000-plus-a-year private schools, all those gentle duo-tone-photographed murmurings about "building critical thinking and fostering democratic citizenship" in their cherished students, living large on their $20,000-a-year island.

Meanwhile, Joseph Biden, the Amtrak senator, standing up boldly for the right to be a Roman Catholic, appears to have sent all three children to the lovely looking Archmere Academy in Delaware. Archmere's Web site notes some public school districts allow Archmere students to use public school buses. Well, isn't that great -- your tax dollars at work in the great state of Delaware because with $18,000 a year in tuition, they can't afford their own buses.

Public schools are for the little people, to be run as the teachers' unions desire, and according to John Dewey's toxic design.

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2 Comments

Carl Pham wrote:

The Obamas sent their kids to the Lab school instead of to Chicago public schools on the South side because the latter are a horror. No kidding, Hyde Park outside of everything protected by the University of Chicago police force and U of C money looks like Lebanon during its civil war. Burned out buildings, cars, drug mongers and hookers lounging on the corner. In the mere year I lived there, my bike wheels were stolen, my car door bent as someone tried to break in, and a woman was murdered and her body left in the small park near my apartment where I used to walk (in the daytime only) with my 2-year-old. The university police have paid to scatter call boxes throughout Hyde Park, concentrating where faculty and students live, that connect you straight to the university police, who are well-armed. Hyde Park is the "Green Zone" of south-side Chicago.

Now, Sandra Tsing Loh is an airhead, which she proves by stumbling across the fact, at the end of her screed, that answers her bemused questions about why, oh why, the public schools are failing despite the bushels of tax money they get and the amazing salaries teachers in them earn (an average of over $70,000 a year in California). She notes that the Chicago public schools score pitifully on standardized tests, but that the public school to which Governor Palin's kids went did quite well, as good as any private school -- even though it almost certainly has less money to spend, real estate tax revenues being what they are in Chicago versus boondocks Alaska.

But Tsing Loh picks herself up after stumbling across this curious illuminating fact and motors on, blissfully unaware that this proves false the canonical leftist canard that it's money that the public schools need to improve. Uh, no. It would be accountability. Let parents fire the teachers and administrators who screw up -- just the way folks who send their kids to the Lab school can "fire" the school (take their kids and tuition money away) if it screws up. Private schools are not more successful because they have more money. (Quite often they don't, actually.) They're successful because there is a strong and direct connection between the quality of job every teacher and administrator does, and whether or not they get paid, and that connection is determined by the people in the best position to judge: the parents of the kids at the school.

Of course, this is thoughtcrime if you are a Democrat, so it can't even be considered. Or rather, won't be until you get a total implosion in public education, to the eternal disadvantage of those poor fools who believed in it.

Think public schools aren't a bit bloated? At my private high school with 800 students and about 45 teachers, the office staff numbered 6 (principal, assistant principal, school nurse, guidance counselor, and two secretaries). At my daughter's public high school, with 1600 students, half the total payroll are not teachers at all. Stalinist madness.

Carl says it well, but I have mixed feelings about Obama's choice. He is absolutely right to have declined using his children as a sacrifice to the gods of the teacher's union, but after all, he does want the rest of us to be denied the privilege. Another example of 'do as I say, not as I do', I suppose...

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About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Rand Simberg published on September 10, 2008 7:30 AM.